Rank with that cornerstone content!

Marieke is partner at Yoast. She runs our academy, marketing and research departments. She loves to write about content SEO and site structure.

Cornerstone articles are those posts that are most important to you. The ones you really want to rank with. The posts that make people come back to your site or buy your stuff. But how do you get those cornerstone articles to end up high in the search engines? How do you get the most out of your cornerstone articles?

In order to rank with these articles, you need a kickass internal linking structure. The internal linking tool of Yoast SEO Premium will help you to do just that! In this post, I’ll explain just what cornerstone content is and how to rank with these articles!

How to rank with your cornerstone content?

Like external links, internal links are very important for SEO. If you want to rank well, your site structure needs to be impeccable. Google perceives the articles that have most internal links pointing towards them as the most important content on your website. That’s why you need to make sure your cornerstones get most internal links. These are the ones you want to rank with!

In addition to that, you need to make sure your links are related. Contextual links are the ones that’ll help you rank. You should make sure that you’re linking from pages that actually are related. Hand-picked, relevant links offer the best possible way of doing this. Automation will not give you quality results. Building a decent linking strategy is a lot of work though, especially if your site is rather large. The internal linking tool of Yoast SEO Premium will help you to build that kickass internal linking structure.

What does the internal linking feature do?

The internal linking tool will help you to quickly pick related links to add to your posts and pages. The internal linking tool analyses all of your posts and chooses which articles are related. In the sidebar, you can easily pick articles that are relevant to link to. You can simply drag and drop the links in your article.

The internal linking tool will thus help you to pick those articles you need to be linking to. The articles will be related and contextual because we analyzed the content of all of your posts on prominent words. If you have indicated that your article is a cornerstone article, it will pop up highest, because they are the most important. Make sure to link to these, whenever they pop up.

What is the cornerstone analysis?

In addition to lots of internal links, cornerstone articles need to have great content to make them rank. That’s what the cornerstone analysis takes care off. Cornerstone articles should be better than your other articles on your site and that means the demands on your writing are higher.

The cornerstone analysis is an adaptation of the default SEO analysis. We changed 2 readability checks and 8 SEO checks to come to the cornerstone analysis. Most important adaptation in the SEO checks is the demand for a lengthy article. It will be harder to score that green bullet. You have to do all the important things right!

Conclusion: how to rank with cornerstones?

Your cornerstone articles deserve special attention. They need to be chosen carefully. Which articles are most important to you? Which are the most complete and authoritative? Cornerstones need many links pointing towards them to make Google see that they are the most important articles. And they deserve your best writing skills. That’ll make them rank in the search engines. That’ll get them the traffic they’re worthy of!